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The largest dump in the world, the Fresh Kills landfill, used to sit on Staten Island, the least populated borough of New York City, from 1948 to 2001. Each day, rubbish from the other four boroughs was collected and ferried to the island’s western shore, through a marshy inlet—a bit like the island’s armpit—where it was unloaded, compacted, arranged in layers, and left to rot. The piles were taller than the Great Sphinx in Egypt; the smell floated across highways and through house windows. Vito Fossella, who was born on the island in the sixties, remembered how the odor would hit him like a wall. When he went to the mall as a child, Fossella would sprint from the car to get inside and escape the air. “Every day, it was a stench,” he said. “There were seagulls flying everywhere.”

It made a few people bitter. “We had five per cent of the city’s population and we got a hundred per cent of the garbage,” Fossella, who is now the Staten Island borough president, told me recently. “Staten Island was dumped on, literally and figuratively, and the rest of the city said, ‘Too bad.’ ” The dump was eventually closed in 2001 under Rudy Giuliani, who had narrowly won the 1993 mayoral election against David Dinkins, a vote largely swung by Staten Islanders. (Giuliani also made the Staten Island ferry free.) That same year, the island’s residents also considered, in a nonbinding plebiscite, whether they even wanted to be a part of New York City anymore. Sixty-five per cent voted no.

Lately, the fever to secede has descended again. Shortly before Christmas, Sam Pirozzolo, a Republican state assemblyman who represents parts of western and central Staten Island, wrote a declaration of independence for the island—modelled after the national one—and read it out loud at the former site of a tavern where, in 1776, British soldiers first heard the original. Andrew Lanza, a Republican state senator, has also drafted legislation that would make secession possible.

Notionally, this push was prompted by the election of Zohran Mamdani, whom Pirozzolo has said epitomizes the way that New York City doesn’t reflect Staten Island’s values. But the discontent runs deeper. Staten Islanders have tried to secede from the rest of the city at least a half-dozen times. In 1900, two years after the modern City of New York was consolidated, two hundred Staten Islanders gathered at a public hearing to say they were “ready to cede.” (Staten Island, one man told the New York bureau of the Chicago Tribune, “is the Ireland of Greater New York. We want home rule.”)

The island is richer, more suburban, more conservative, more car-dependent, less dense, and cut off from the rest of the city by the deep water of New York Harbor. There is a sense on the island that the rest of the city doesn’t listen to them, and that they pay for city initiatives they don’t want.

In 2024, the island voted for Donald Trump by thirty points. And, in recent years, Staten Islanders have protested the opening of a migrant shelter, speed cameras, marijuana dispensaries, and the placement of a battery-storage site too close to homes, all of which they say have been foisted on them by the city. (Worst of all, Fossella told me an anecdote about an ugly metal fence that suddenly appeared on a “beautiful” stone wall in Clove Lakes Park, because the Department of Transportation claimed that it was near a waterway. “If Staten Island were a separate city, that would never have happened.”) Another indignity? “Staten Island is the only borough in the city without a high school for performing arts,” Fossella said. “It’s almost like that movie—they’re just not into us anymore. They keep doing things that we don’t support.” In the nineties, the city clung to the island through a legal principle known as home rule, which would require the mayor and City Council to sign off on Staten Island leaving.

Giuliani never did. The reaction veered to extremes. In 1995, an angry resident of Oakwood, in the borough’s southwest, wrote to the Staten Island Advance, “We no longer are in a mutually agreed upon union with the other four boroughs. It is now more reminiscent of the Anschluss that joined Austria to Germany in 1938, with some overtones of the later occupation of Czechoslovakia.” Pirozolo told me, “If we vote to leave, keeping us would be indentured servitude or slavery. You pick.”

Do the secessionists have a point? Recently, I spoke to Howard Husock, an academic at the American Enterprise Institute who studies secession movements. There’s a strong theoretical basis to secession, he told me. “Geographically, it’s really part of New Jersey.” As he described it, the reason to leave is less about Mamdani and more about local control. If Staten Island were to part ways, the proposal is that it would become an independent city within New York State. It would determine its own zoning and oversee its own school boards, meaning residents could control the curriculum, something Husock said Staten Islanders would probably value.

Other nearby cities and counties that orbit New York City—such as Montclair and Bergen, in New Jersey; or Manhasset, on Long Island; or Westchester, above the Bronx—are demographically similar to Staten Island, and run themselves. “They look out over the water and see them,” Husock said. “They see the suburban Montclairs of the world, and they say, ‘Wait a minute, they get to call the shots in their own communities, and we don’t.’ ”

But what would actually happen? If the City of Staten Island were created tomorrow, it would immediately become the second-largest city in New York State. (Population: nearly half a million.) It would keep a lot of its bus routes, because the M.T.A. is managed by the state, and Staten Island still falls in the Metropolitan Transit District. (“They’re not seceding from that,” Husock said.) The ferry, though, is operated by New York City. It would probably still run, but it may not be free.

It’s possible that Staten Islanders would individually pay more taxes, but they might like that. The voters of an independent Staten, Husock said, could choose to pay more for the bundle of services that they want. A report from the Independent Budget Office, from 2024, estimated that secessionists would need to fill a budget gap of at least a hundred and seventy million dollars. It also warned that the island would lose out on New York’s economies of scale. Staten Island would, for example, have to renegotiate its deal with Spectrum and Verizon.

In addition to handling schools, Staten Island would have to run its own fire department, trash collection, hospitals, and snow removal. But so do other cities. “Buffalo is a city!” Fosella said. “It’s smaller than Staten Island. So clearly it can be done. It’s not like it’s the end of the world.”

Sam Pirozzolo, a New York State assemblyman for the Sixty-Third District of Staten Island.Photograph by Charly Triballeau / AFP / Getty

The police would be a big sticking point. On an independent Staten Island, the politics of policing seem to flip. Paul Costello, a lifelong resident, who was one of the field leads for Staten Island for the Mamdani campaign, told me that the Republicans who are pushing to secede would miss the N.Y.P.D. “As a person who is hypercritical of the N.Y.P.D., it is the best-funded police force probably on the planet,” he said. The department’s annual budget last year was $5.8 billion. “For a pro-police person, they have everything they want right now,” he said. “They’re basically saying they want to kneecap them, which, hey, I’m all for. But it doesn’t really make sense.”

There’s a utopian model for what Staten Island could be, and it’s Yonkers. Yonkers, Husock explained, is a predominantly white, working-class community, of two hundred thousand people, connected to New York City by the Metro-North and buses, and governed by center-right Democrats. It runs its own police, fire, and schools. “I think they have Yonkers envy,” Husock said. “They’re not going to become Scarsdale, obviously, but they would become Yonkers.”

Not everybody agrees. “It’s not a good idea,” Costello told me. Being a part of New York City, he said, means that “we get literally the best services available to anyone in the country.” “It’s an old feeling,” he said, of secession, “but it’s not founded in financial literacy.”

Costello, who is thirty-one, grew up on Staten Island’s north shore, went to high school and college on the island, and now lives in St. George, near the ferry. “I love Staten Island with all my heart,” he said. But every time secession rolls around it can feel like living through the Civil War. “It’s like I’m a guy on the border between the Union and the Confederacy. And I’m like, ‘No, I’m part of the fringe that lives here that actually agrees with the North.’ ”

I asked Husock, the advocate of local control, why every borough couldn’t make the same argument as Staten Island. “I would make that argument for every neighborhood,” he said. “The logical policy extension of Staten Island secession is deconsolidation of New York City.” Even the boroughs could be sliced further into smaller neighborhoods, Husock said. “In my ideal configuration, it would be a patchwork of smaller municipalities that had certain shared metropolitan services. It’s really a thought experiment,” he added. “But Staten Island is forcing the thought experiment.”

At one point, much of Brooklyn didn’t want to be a part of New York City, either. In the nineteenth century, Brooklyn and Manhattan were independent, competing cities that often squabbled over shipping lanes in the East River. Consolidation was put to a popular vote in 1894. In Brooklyn, it passed by only about two hundred and fifty votes, and then a consortium of politicians from the borough went to Albany and filibustered it for years. In that same election, Staten Island voted for consolidation by a huge margin—seventy-eight per cent said yes. (Yonkers voted no, while Queens voted sixty-two per cent to join and the Bronx had already been fully annexed in 1895.)

Who would win the breakup—Staten Island or New York? Nobody really knows. The 2024 report from the I.B.O. relied mostly on studies from the nineties. Fossella, the borough president, announced in 2023 that he was commissioning his own economic report, but there has been no progress. “We’ve put out feelers for entities that could do it,” he said. “They have to get back to us.”

The other day, I met Pirozzolo, the drafter of the Staten Island declaration of independence, in a quiet room with shag carpets in the archive of the College of Staten Island. He wore a blue suit and a snazzy tie patterned with green and blue diamonds. A stack of boxes was wheeled in by James Kaser, a soft-spoken librarian in glasses, a blue polo, and green slacks. The college is home to one of the largest collections of documents—financials, committee reports, white papers—from the 1993 secession push. “We typically go one box at a time,” Kaser said.

Pirozzolo was focussed. “I’m looking for something that says, ‘New York City Police Department. Costs a million dollars, and that includes ‘A,’ ‘B,’ ‘C,’ and ‘D,’ ” he said. His chief of staff, Nick Robbins, who was wearing a bright-blue New York Giants jersey, pulled out an overstuffed folder of files. Records included “Staten Island Secession: The Price of Independence” and the original secession bill. “Bingo!” Pirozzolo said. In another trove, they found a table that listed city budgets in 1991 from across the country—Atlanta, Austin, Denver. “This one is awesome,” Pirozzolo said. Another page had an itemized list of Staten Island’s on-island expenditures, in the nineties, from various departments: education, health, the library, sanitation—everything that a stand-alone city would need. Pirozzolo traced his hand down the page, quietly reading them out. “Mental health, parks. This is gold,” he said.

Kaser came in, balancing a new pile of booklets. “Now that I know what you’re looking for, there are stacks of this,” he said. “That looks like ancient stuff!” Pirozzolo said. “I don’t know if I want to touch it.” Kaser said, “It’s not ancient. It’s from the nineties.” Pirozzolo waggled “The Price of Independence.” “Can I slip this in a briefcase or something?”

A spokesman for the Fiscal Policy Institute told me that it was unlikely that Staten Island gives more money to the city than the city gives it. He estimated that the island contributes 3.4 per cent of the city’s revenue and receives 5.2 per cent of its spending.

Despite his digging, Pirozzolo is still nowhere closer to knowing what the price of independence, in modern terms, would be. But, he told me, “Now when I go to the city budget, and I say, ‘I need these numbers,’ at least I know what I’m asking for.”

Until 1975, the official name of Staten Island was Richmond, after the title of the youngest illegitimate son of King Charles II. (He had at least twelve.) The sense of estrangement has lingered. “There’s always been the forgotten-borough trope,” Costello, the Mamdani campaigner, told me.

During the final debate of the mayoral primary, in June of last year, the various Democratic candidates were asked which borough they had spent the least time in. In succession, Adrienne Adams, Andrew Cuomo, Brad Lander, Mamdani, Zellnor Myrie, and Whitney Tilson all answered—to escalating laughs—“Staten Island.” Costello was watching the debate at a bar with friends. I asked how it made him feel. “I would have been surprised if any of them answered differently,” he said. “It’s kind of expected. But, of course, it takes a little hit. You’re, like, ‘Ah, come on.’ ”

When Costello was growing up, his high school was right next to the dump. As he got off the school bus and walked to class, he could see it in the background. But he also saw it changing. For the past twenty years, the dump has been slowly beautified, rewilded, and converted into parkland. Now known as Freshkills Park, it will be one of the biggest stretches of nature in the five boroughs—nearly three times the size of Central Park—when it’s completed in 2036. One of Costello’s friends works there as a field educator and gives guided tours. Birds have started returning. Maybe because of this, Costello doesn’t feel the burn of the metaphor like older residents do. “If anything, it’s funny that I went to high school next to a dump,” he said. “As they fixed it, it was kind of pretty.”

Since the campaign, Mamdani has stopped by the island more often: he ate at a local soul-food restaurant, Shaw-naé’s House, and attended evening prayer at a mosque in Dongan Hills during Ramadan. In early March, he made a major child-care announcement, about the expansion of 3-K, at a pre-K center on the island’s north shore. (Staten Island had been excluded from an earlier 2-K announcement.) That same month, a new Democratic candidate, Allison Ziogas said that she would challenge the island’s sitting Republican congresswoman, Nicole Malliotakis, from a pro-labor, economic-populist angle. Generations of Democrats and Republicans, Ziogas said, in her campaign launch, had failed in representing the island. “People talk about Staten Island like we have nothing to offer,” she said. Ziogas, who is originally from Connecticut, added, “I like to say that I’m a Staten Islander by love.”

“I’m one of the biggest evangelists for the island,” Costello told me. “There are some amazing restaurants, some amazing people, and the most parks anywhere in the city.” (Staten Island has some of New York’s best Sri Lankan food.) The only way he’d abandon the island is if the rest of its residents actually quit New York City. “It takes a lot to think about leaving,” he said. “The reason I would ever leave here is because of how many other people don’t want to be here. It’s not because it isn’t a good place to live.” ♦

If you filled out a March Madness bracket, I have bad news. The team you picked to win it all won’t. For the ninth tournament in a row, your bracket is busted by the second round.

And you’re left asking yourself questions. “Why did I pick them?” or “Why do all the kids on the team look older than me?”

All valid questions, but there’s no time to sulk. You must figure out who you’re cheering on for the rest of the tournament until they inevitably lose in heartbreaking fashion. Don’t worry, I’m here to assist you. (Get it? “Assist”? Weaved a basketball term in there. By the way, I did it again with “weave.”) Here are schools to root for in March Madness once your bracket fails.

The School Your Mom Went To
Your mom’s alma mater is a good team to root for. It’s where she had a class with that other student she copied all her answers from. She also named you after that student. You owe it to that school to support them in their quest for the title.

The School with the Child of a Celebrity
There are some prominent public figures who have kids playing collegiate sports. Those kids probably get weird treatment from their peers because they’re seen as “nepo babies” or because their parents illegally arranged for them to attend the school. None of that may be true, and, if it is, let’s cheer for their success while we can, before the authorities rain on their parade.

The School That Has the Cool Cinderella Story
We love a good underdog story. In the Big Dance, that team is called the Cinderella; they’re a lower seed and are surprising everybody by advancing. They’re fun to root for. Plus, while they’re stunning everybody, you can lie and tell people you picked them to go far.

The School Whose Merch You Already Have
Forget talent, stats, and matchups. Just find a school that you already own merch from. Doesn’t matter if it’s a hat, a sweater, a tote bag, anything. You can pull it out and act like you went there. When people ask if you did, it’s none of their business that you attended community college online.

The School with the Youngest Coach
The N.C.A.A. tournament is filled with first-time or very young head coaches just starting out in their careers. They have full heads of hair, they wear cool Jordans, and they’re even good at social media. Support that young coach. Don’t be bitter because he’s living his dream at only twenty-four years old and you’re not. Use him as inspiration for your goals and your outfits.

The School with the Lowest Tuition
Whichever school is keeping its tuition low should have our support. Who cares if its basketball facilities are subpar and its fraternities are known for odd hazing traditions? All that matters is that it is allowing students to leave with the least debt.

The School That Would’ve Accepted Your SAT Score
The SATs stumped most people. However, some schools try to act like the test really measures your knowledge and your abilities (not factoring in that you didn’t eat breakfast that day and nobody is good at math when hungry). That’s why we should root for the schools that took those factors into account. The universities that give grace and low-SAT-score students a chance to flourish. We’re rooting for you.

The School with the Seventh-Year Senior
Some teams have players who should’ve left the school years ago. However, those students found loopholes to stay enrolled and avoid entering the job market. Well played. This economy is terrible. Enjoy the free shelter and transportation while you can. Let’s root for them to get that championship before they endure the stress of job hunting.

Anyone but Duke
I’m out of reasons, but no matter what happens with your bracket do not root for Duke. Why would you want to be that person? ♦

Simon Flowers has spent more than four decades working in the energy industry and analyzing it. After studying geology at Edinburgh University at the beginning of the nineteen-eighties, he worked for two years on exploration wells in the eastern Mediterranean, then joined Wood Mackenzie, which was then a stockbroker known for its energy research. When he started out, oil and gasoline prices were falling after two big shocks in the nineteen-seventies. Since then, he’s witnessed gluts in which prices collapsed, two previous Gulf wars that disrupted supply, and other major price spikes, including one in 2008 that was driven by strong demand and stagnant production, and another in 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine. Now the chairman and lead analyst of Wood Mackenzie, which has evolved into a global energy consultancy, Flowers is no stranger to dramatic turns and market volatility. But even he was surprised last week when Iranian missiles struck the huge Ras Laffan liquid-natural-gas (L.N.G.) complex in Qatar, which converts gas that comes out of the ground into a liquid that can be transported on ships over long distances. “It takes the whole thing to another level,” Flowers, who is still based in Edinburgh, said to me in a video interview a day after the Iranian strike, which came in response to an Israeli attack on an Iranian gas field. Looking at a screen on his desk, he pointed out that the price of L.N.G.—a fuel widely used in power stations and heating systems—had jumped by thirty per cent in a single day.

In addition to bombing Ras Laffan, which is the world’s biggest L.N.G. export facility, the Iranian government had struck other energy infrastructure sites in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. After this escalation, the cost of a barrel of Brent crude oil, which comes from the North Sea and serves as a global benchmark in the oil markets, spiked up to nearly a hundred and twenty dollars. (Before the war, it was below seventy dollars.) “If the type of attacks we have seen over the past days continue, the oil price would likely go to a hundred and fifty dollars a barrel, and quite possibly to two hundred dollars,” Flowers said.

On the day that I spoke with Flowers, Donald Trump said that he had told Israel not to repeat its strike on Iranian gas fields, and Benjamin Netanyahu said that the country would hold off. But the tit-for-tat attacks were another sign that the war, and its economic consequences, was spiralling out of Trump’s control. Just as the President has inexplicably failed to anticipate Iran’s moves to close the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping lane for oil and L.N.G., and to target energy infrastructure in other Gulf states, he and his advisers appear to have overlooked the enduring influence of the Middle East in the global energy supply chain, and how disrupting this chain can harm the U.S. economy. A “National Security Strategy” document that the White House released in November notes that in recent years energy supplies “have diversified greatly, with the United States once again a net energy exporter.” And it said that as “American energy production ramps up, America’s historic reason for focusing on the Middle East will recede.” Yet ordinary Americans, who have seen the price of gasoline jump by almost a third in a few weeks, find themselves, once again, hostage to events in the Gulf. And the economic challenges facing many of America’s allies in Europe and Asia, which rely almost entirely on imports of oil and gas, are even more acute.

The key thing that the Administration’s national-security strategy neglects is that the market for oil is global, not national. Even as the explosive growth of fracking has turned the U.S. into the world’s leading oil producer, bigger even than Saudi Arabia, the oil price in the U.S. still gets determined in the global financial markets, where prices adjust to balance global supply with global demand. Inevitably, that adjustment process reflects developments in the Middle East, where about fifty per cent of the world’s oil reserves and about forty per cent of its natural-gas reserves are situated. Over the longer term, the rise of renewable sources of energy, such as solar and wind, could greatly reduce the importance of the Gulf producers. But with hydrocarbons currently meeting about eighty per cent of the world’s energy needs that hasn’t happened yet.

When I asked Flowers, half a century after the oil-price shocks of the nineteen-seventies, why energy markets are still so dependent on the Gulf, his response was telling. “Oil demand keeps growing and the supply has got to come from somewhere: that’s the core of it,” he said. Many countries in Europe and Asia don’t produce any oil, and they have no option but to import it. Taken together, the oil importers purchase about forty million barrels a day, of which at least fifteen million originate in the Gulf. If a large chunk of this supply gets shut off, as it did when Iran closed the Strait immediately after the U.S.-Israel attack, there is inevitably a significant impact on prices. “You can’t lose fifteen million barrels overnight and not see major repercussions,” Flowers noted.

Since the war began, its impact on the oil supply chain has taken place in stages, the analyst explained. Once the Strait was closed, insurers refused to cover cargoes destined for the narrow channel. “Ships couldn’t travel, and the whole supply chain was disrupted,” he said. With hundreds of fully loaded tankers stranded at sea, there was a shortage of empty ships to pick up new cargoes. For a short time, the four leading producers apart from Iran—Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, and the U.A.E.—kept their wells operating and let the oil pile up in onshore storage facilities. But, by the start of last week, most of these facilities were full. The producers were forced to stop pumping operations at some of the wells, shutting in the oil beneath them. According to Wood Mackenzie’s calculations, across the four countries, about nine million barrels of oil a day have now been shut-in, which is more than eight per cent of the prewar total.

The oil shock is unprecedented—bigger in percentage terms than the shocks of the nineteen-seventies—but, at least until last week, it had unfolded much as Flowers and his colleagues expected after the war began. They had not, however, accounted for the possibility that the conflict would expand to large-scale attacks on energy infrastructure. The chief executive of the state-owned Qatar Energy said that the Iranian missile strikes knocked out about a sixth of its L.N.G. facilities, and it would take up to five years to repair them. At about the same time, the Pentagon confirmed that U.S. warplanes and helicopters were flying over the Strait in an effort to blast Iranian speedboats and shoot down Iranian attack drones. “In the first couple of weeks, it was possible to believe that the war would be quite short, and oil production could resume quite quickly after it ended,” Flowers said. “But that is looking less and less likely.”

With hostilities expanding, oil analysts are raising their estimates of the damage it is projected to cause. In 2008, in an environment of strong demand and stagnant production, the price of Brent reached close to a hundred and forty dollars a barrel. Last week, Goldman Sachs said that the price is expected to exceed its all-time high if the threat of a lengthier disruption persisted.

For many Americans, the most visible and immediate effect of an oil-price shock is higher gasoline prices. The average gas price across the country is now close to four dollars, compared with less than three dollars before the war began. If the oil price keeps rising, the gas price could reach five dollars. But over time rising oil prices also raise the cost of many other things, including airfares, plastics, and fertilizers. Oil shocks can also alarm investors—the Dow has fallen for four weeks in a row—and in recent years high asset prices have been a key prop for consumer spending. Despite these warning signs, many economists think that the economy will scrape through this year without a recession—Goldman, for example, puts the probability of one developing at just twenty-five per cent. But this is simply guesswork. As Jerome Powell, the Fed chairman, said last week, the surge in oil prices represents “an energy shock of some size and duration,” which has created so much uncertainty that “we just don’t know” what will happen.

The good news is that, although the U.S. is still dependent on fossil fuels, its economy is far less energy intensive than it was in the nineteen-seventies and early eighties, when there were two deep recessions associated with OPEC oil-price shocks. For every dollar of G.D.P. that the U.S. creates today, it uses about half as much energy as it did in 1980. Oil prices rose steeply in 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, and still the economy eked out a year of modest expansion. But there are counter-arguments: job growth is much weaker now than it was four years ago, and veteran observers of the oil industry recall how in 1990 and in 2008 price spikes were followed by recessions. “It is very worrying,” Flowers said, of the surge. “If we end up with Brent averaging a hundred dollars a barrel this year, it could push global growth below two per cent, and you could easily see major Western countries, including the U.S. and Europe, slip into recession in the second half of the year.”

The optimistic scenario is that Trump claims victory and calls off the war before more damage is done to energy infrastructure, which could enable oil prices to fall back rapidly and prevent lasting economic damage. (Short price spikes do much less harm than long ones.) In logistical terms, it would take two or three months for the Gulf oil producers to restore most of the production they have shut off, Flowers said. But this wouldn’t be the only challenge, he added: “The U.S. Administration could declare victory on whatever terms it wants, but the insurance companies would want assurances that peace was real and lasting.” If they didn’t get assurances that satisfied them from all three parties to the war—the United States, Israel, and Iran—they could still refuse to cover ships and cargoes passing through the Strait, thereby delaying any return to normality, or near-normality.

With Trump, of course, anything could happen. On Friday, he said that he is considering “winding down” the war. On Saturday, he said that the U.S. will “hit and obliterate” Iran’s power plants if it doesn’t open the Strait within forty-eight hours. Flowers, for his part, wasn’t feeling very optimistic going into the weekend. Comparing the Iranian oil shock to previous ones he has lived through, Flowers said to me in an e-mail, “This may be building towards the biggest crisis . . . from an energy point of view. That’s because the worst-case scenario is that the war proves difficult to stop, leaving the global economy short of reliable sources of oil, crude products (including fertilizer feedstock) and L.N.G. for an extended period.” If this outcome does materialize, all economic bets are off. ♦

You can tell a lot about a society’s health by its lines. It’s probably not a good sign that airports have been experiencing Soviet levels of security lines recently: three and a half hours at Houston Hobby, lines wrapping around the building in Fort Lauderdale, lines spilling onto the sidewalk in Austin. There are some outlier lines that hint at abundance or gluttony—your lines of coke or of conga—but lines generally broadcast supply problems: breadlines, Cuban bodega lines, embargo-era gas lines. Donald Trump, after a natural disaster, has been known to throw supplies into a crowd (What line? There’s more than enough for everyone!), but also boasts of the line lengths at his rallies. It’s the same reason Louis XIV cultivated lines for an audience. When you’ve got the goods, scarcity projects power. In French, la queue is slang for “penis.”

At J.F.K. (more than an hour) and Newark (seventy-one minutes), passengers wait on line, in our peculiar regional formulation. In Atlanta (two hours) and New Orleans (three) and pretty much everywhere else, they wait in line, except for the Brits, who queue. Theirs is a country obsessed with hierarchy and one’s place in it; queuing etiquette is basically their citizenship exam. Americans tend to have less patience. You can track political discontent via inflation and inequality, or you can look at lines: voting lines, vaccine lines, virtual lines for veterans’ benefits. The airport lines have resulted from a government shutdown, our third in six months. T.S.A. agents, who haven’t been fully paid since February 14th, have been calling in sick. There have been digital lines for Social Security checks (blame DOGE) and for Harry Styles (blame Ticketmaster). New Yorkers can pay thirty-two hundred dollars for a studio apartment, but often only after waiting on a long line to tour it.

Lines are more insulting, of course, when they’re distributed unequally. PreCheck, first class, CLEAR. Lines reveal whose time is worth more than whose. (See: women’s bathroom lines.) In Dubai, apparently, the ruling Emiratis get to cut, as do politicians in Thailand. But there’s something egalitarian about an unadulterated line. This is a system that’s un-gameable by algorithm, concierge, or bot. Its rules need no explanation (though Wimbledon’s queuing guide is five pages), and violators are treated harshly. In 2006, a guy stabbed an alleged line cheat near a midtown halal cart, and even a prosecutor acknowledged that everyone hates a cutter. “They sneak,” she said. “Is that polite? No. But is it criminal? No.”

Vladimir Sorokin, who wrote a novel called “The Queue,” viewed the line as the U.S.S.R.’s defining feature. (Soviet joke: A man in an endless line for vodka leaves to go kill Stalin but soon returns. The line to kill Stalin was even longer.) In a way, the Soviet Union ended not when the wall fell but when the line did. Sorokin wrote, “The line was dispersed and reborn as a crowd.”

The queuer’s paradox: passing a line, you want to join it. Biblically speaking, the first line was Noah’s. You wanted to be in that one. We queue for the cronut, Trader Joe’s, Shakespeare, and the Jimmy Choo sample sale. One notices the line at Lucali, but not at Sbarro. “A longer line could signal value,” Jamol Pender, a professor of queuing theory at Cornell, said the other day. Lines are unavoidable (“One of my journal papers took three years to come back to me,” Pender said. “It was about queuing”), but there are mitigation methods. Airports situate gates far from baggage claim—people don’t mind walking to their bags, but they do mind lining up to wait for them.

On a recent afternoon, the line at LaGuardia’s Terminal B was one of the longest in the country. Estimate: twenty-eight minutes. That seemed suspect; it overflowed through the concourse. An amateur queuing theorist waited in front of Muizz Shaikh, a physical therapist from Pune, India, who was heading to a conference in Phoenix, via Denver. India is a country of many lines but different norms. You can talk your way through. “In Pune, we have a savory which we call vada pav,” Shaikh said. “People line up for it, but the service is quick. It’s like five minutes.”

His trip so far: Two entry lines in Mumbai. Lines for check-in and boarding. A security line in Dubai, where an Iranian drone had reportedly hit an oil tank, necessitating a stopover to fill up in Jeddah, which had a taxi line to the runway. Shaikh landed at J.F.K. (customs), but his next flight was cancelled. “Thirty-four hours I have been travelling,” he said. “I don’t have any energy left.”

The estimated twenty-eight minutes came and went. The travellers weren’t even halfway to the checkpoint. Eyes glazed at the forty-minute mark. A guy with Louis Vuitton luggage and a wad of cash yelled at his family. Nine minutes later, Shaikh chose between three I.D.-screening sub-lines. “I always seem to pick the slower side,” he said. Fifty-five minutes and thirty seconds after joining, he made it through and headed to his gate. There was enough time to linger in the pre-boarding blob line, to enter the official line, and to queue on the jet bridge, before heading to his seat. ♦

On the topic of “Tristan und Isolde,” Richard Wagner once said, “Only mediocre performances can save me! Thoroughly good ones would drive people insane.” Fortunately for the body politic, perfect performances of Wagner’s love-death epic seem impossible. During my time in the classical-music watchtower, I’ve seen a dozen or so productions of the opera, and something is always out of whack—often, many things. At the Met in 1999, amid semi-abstract mood pictures and under the direction of Dieter Dorn, René Pape delivered a transfixing portrayal of King Mark, while James Levine cultivated sonorous inertia in the pit and Ben Heppner and Jane Eaglen struggled to animate the title roles. At the same venue in 2016, the musical values were superb—Simon Rattle conducting with sinuous authority, Nina Stemme and Stuart Skelton lending vocal richness to the doomed lovers—but Mariusz Treliński’s staging groped around in modern-dress murk. Of the productions I’ve witnessed, Peter Sellars and Bill Viola’s video-centered collaboration came closest to highest bliss, especially in the version I saw at the Paris Opera in 2005, with Waltraud Meier in full, ferocious dramatic flight as Isolde. Yet even the finest efforts leave countless avenues unexplored.

Perhaps the most striking thing about “Tristan” is the way it combines the metaphysical-philosophical with the psychological-realistic. The piece is steeped in Schopenhauer’s meditations on the futility of worldly striving and the necessity of accepting oblivion. It is also infused with Wagner’s paganistic worship of desire and his matchless ability to translate longing into perpetually unresolved musical phrases. At the same time, “Tristan” observes the Aristotelian unities in a way that puts its characters under enormous dramatic pressure. Each of the three acts unfolds in real time, and each has one node of decisive action: Tristan and Isolde drink the presumed death potion that makes them fall in love; they are discovered in the garden of King Mark, Isolde’s betrothed; Tristan dies, with Isolde following. Furthermore, Wagner insists on showing how every mad love affair makes others suffer. After the volcanic duet of Act II comes Mark’s howl of sorrow, for which the listener is never really prepared. The impossibility of the opera lies in resolving those two vastly different spheres, the cosmic and the intimate.

The Met’s latest production, under the direction of Yuval Sharon, is stronger on the philosophical than the psychological. Sharon, who first drew notice for astounding multimedia spectacles with the Industry company in Los Angeles, is an experienced Wagnerian who presented a persuasive feminist take on “Lohengrin” at the Bayreuth Festival in 2018. He has a grounding in Brechtian theatre and is not one to dawdle in Romantic atmosphere. He sees Tristan and Isolde not as isolated flesh-and-blood characters but as archetypes who recur across tellings and retellings of the legend, from medieval times to the present. The opera unfurls on two planes. One, at the front of the stage, is centered on tables where rituals take place—a shared drink, a meal, a deathbed watch. The other, filling the Met’s proscenium, is an iris-like portal that suggests a gateway into dream worlds and the beyond. The singers are accompanied by doubles performing parallel actions on one or the other plane.

In Act I, the stage picture is cluttered, the meaning unclear. This is an all too familiar issue at the modern Met, which, under the aegis of Peter Gelb, the general manager, more or less mandates clutter: hulking sets (by Es Devlin, in this case), choreography (by Annie-B Parson), video and live projections (by Ruth Hogben and Jason H. Thompson). The audience is often left unsure about what it should be looking at. Lost in the melee of imagery—ocean waves, bottles and potions, knives, and so on—is the crux on which the opera turns: Isolde’s uncontainable rage at being carted off to marry King Mark, in the clutches of the man who killed her beloved.

Later on, Sharon’s conception snaps into focus. In Act II, Devlin’s set becomes a floating fantasy realm where the lovers lose themselves in their forbidden desires. They sing from the inside of a conelike apparatus that has the property of amplifying their voices. At times, segments of the cone separate and carry the lovers in opposite directions—an excellent visual metaphor for the narcissism of their passion. In Act III, as the wounded Tristan suffers, hallucinates, and dies, he is seen both lying on a hospital table and wandering in a tunnel populated by white-clad figures. The singer and his double change places as the character passes in and out of consciousness. At the end, Isolde is seen giving birth to a child and joining Tristan in the beyond. The images are at once affecting and jarring—dream and nightmare intermingled. The confusions of Act I notwithstanding, Sharon has passed the “Tristan” challenge. He will next take on the “Ring,” beginning in the 2027-28 season.

The chief musical pleasure of this “Tristan,” on the second night of the run, was Michael Spyres’s portrayal of the damaged hero. This Missouri-born, Vienna-trained tenor has the capacity to sing almost anything, his repertory encompassing Handel, Mozart, bel canto, grand opera, and Wagner. Even more remarkably, he can assume baritone roles as well as tenor ones. He calls himself a “baritenor,” and the label fits. He is thus well suited to Tristan, whose music often borders on the baritonal. Lauritz Melchior, the part’s most storied interpreter on recording, had a similarly broad range. If Spyres cannot match Melchior’s trumpeting high notes, he traversed the score with unfaltering stamina, retaining clarity of diction and breadth of phrase throughout. I don’t think I’ve ever heard Tristan sung so securely and so musically.

The heavily promoted Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen proved problematic as Isolde. She has been appointed the Met’s leading lady in Wagner and is slated to sing Brünnhilde in Sharon’s “Ring.” Her high notes are glorious, spurring comparisons with Birgit Nilsson and other legends. But Isolde isn’t about high notes. Large tracts of the role lie lower in the voice, where mezzo-ish resonance is required. Davidsen’s power drops off markedly in the octave above middle C. Often, the part jumps in and out of that zone, as on the words “Fluch deinem Haupt” (“A curse on your head!”), which falls from the G at the top of the staff to the G below and then climbs up again. The fluctuating volume in such passages—“FLUCH deinem HAUPT”—made for a weirdly uneven line. Beyond that, Davidsen’s diction was mushy, and she lacked the expressive fury of Meier and other great latter-day Isoldes. Yes, the upper register is phenomenal, but I’d rather hear an Isolde who has squeaky high C’s and can sing the rest at full strength.

The subsidiary roles were a similarly mixed lot. The veteran bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny delivered Kurwenal with roughshod interpretive conviction; he is a born Wagner singer. Ryan Speedo Green, as King Mark, may not have matched Pape’s raw grandeur in the role, but he supplied an affecting sense of shattered nobility. Ekaterina Gubanova, who sang Brangäne glowingly in 2016, was less lustrous this time around.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, might have resolved some of the evening’s inconsistencies if he had shown more consideration for the singers and generated more intensity at the climaxes. Yet long stretches, the awesome Prelude included, unspooled with no sense of urgency. For decades, the Met orchestra was the prize of the institution; individual players remain excellent, but the collective now lacks distinction. One of Sharon’s brightest inventions is to bring Pedro R. Díaz, the Met’s English-horn player, onstage for his long solos in Act III, so that he becomes a denizen of Tristan’s tunnel of delirium. His melancholy seems symbolic on another level. Under Gelb’s leadership, the Met has steadily lost money, audiences, and artistic eminence. The company is not yet in its death throes, but it is in need of drastic intervention. ♦